At midnight of 12 August 1961 East Germany became partitioned from the West by an ideological barrier that would remain a chancroid rash upon the political landscape of post WW2 Europe for some forty-five years. Initially little more than rolls of barbed wire, this barrier soon became the concrete monolith known the world over as the Berlin Wall. Prior to the construction of the wall an exodus of some 3.5 million East Germans circumvented the Eastern Bloc emigration restrictions in order to escape the socialist nightmare that many knew was now imminent. For those on the other side of the...